Goodbye, Tom Petty: dad-rock's sly revolutionary

I listened to all of Into the Great Wide Open yesterday, just as the sad news was flowing in, and I was struck by what excellent music this is. (Prior to this, I'd forgotten the deep cut "Two Gunslingers" even existed, but the song came back to me instantly, like an old friend.) The album came out just a couple months before Nevermind, but somehow, almost miraculously, Tom Petty's songs were in the air during his time in a way that none of his fellow dad-rockers' work really seemed to be. I remember those few albums, Full Moon Fever, ITGWO and Wildflowers being maybe the strongest musical bridge between my friends and I (all budding teenage punks and metalheads by this time) and our respective parents. Everyone seemed to love these songs.

Sure, the MTV exposure helped, but that cinematic quality was already in the songs themselves. As Phil Freeman put it on Twitter yesterday, the opening of "Listen to Your Heart" ("So you think you're gonna take her away / With your money and your cocaine") is "an entire short story in two lines" (a notion he expanded on in a very sharp Stereogum essay). Yes. And that's true of so many of these classics. The rise-and-fall Hollywood narrative of "Into the Great Open" (which seemed so spot-on then, in the twilight of hair metal) always got me, especially the part about how "their A-and-R man said, 'I don't hear a single.'" Petty just had this sort of hard wisdom about how he put things, combined with a knowing way of singing these words that felt, especially as his career wore on, sly and cynical but also deeply empathetic — in contrast to the more fiery, screechy delivery of the early hits like "Refugee." Add in that sort of hazy, drawling quality his music had, that shimmering vibe of California psychedelia that was so prevalent in songs like "Last Dance With Mary Jane" and "Free Fallin'," and you had an almost magically durable strain of radio rock.

Sure there were, say, Don Henley's poignant solo hits (not to mention the mighty Graceland) earlier and Neil Young's transporting Harvest Moon later, other efforts that seemed to transfigure the spirit of '60s and '70s rock into something more ethereal and enchanting, but somehow, Petty, with invaluable assistance from producers like Jeff Lynne and Rick Rubin, was the laid-back king of this quiet neo-dad-rock revolution.

Later on, I would discover Bob Dylan in earnest and probably began to take Tom Petty for granted a bit. Clearly, Petty owes Dylan so much and we tend to think of the latter as somehow more authentic, a true poet as opposed to a dad-rock figurehead. (Unless we just think of them as Charlie T. and Lucky Wilbury, respectively; shout-out to the sublimely corny "Last Night.") But the truth is that in some ways, Petty might be the greater songwriter, one who put as much poetry into his simple, indelible melodies as into his economical, evocative lyrics. Bob Dylan could do many things, but I'm not sure he ever wrote a song as catchy and gently wrenching as this:



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*I'm really enjoying my Rolling Stone colleague Andy Greene's interviews with Tom's Heartbreakers bandmates (Ron Blair, Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench). A lot of insights into the inner-workings of a great American band. This 50 Greatest Songs list is also an illuminating read.